LAW-RIDDEN PRUSSIA

Greymouth Evening Star, 4 December 1929, Page 3

LAW-RIDDEN PRUSSIA

POLICE POWERS RESTRICTED. Prussia, which has had the unenviable reputation of being the most police-ridden country in Europe, -is, now scrapping thousands of police regulations, especially those dating from prior $o 1890. Within six fnonths 10,000 local ordinances have been rescinded and in future only 1500 main police stations will have the power to issue new ones instead of more than 11,000 as heretofore. On all matters pertaining to the protection of public gardens, forests, moors and lakes, and public welfare generally, the local civil authorities will make their own regulations instead of the police. - ' In an effort to show how people can be made to behave on a minimum number of regulations, Dr. Johannes Werth.auer, one of Berlin’s leading jurists, has compiled a penal code consisting of only twenty-one paragraphs instead of the present 418. Judge Werthauer holds that proper social education should be an adequate pre- 1 vention of crime. He eliminated, . for instance, the intricate laws governing libel and slander in their more' abstruse aspects. Avoiding much legal phraseology, he has written his new code in language - that can be “understood of the people.” Protection of labour and of personal security he iriakes much more stringent, while penalties for bigamy and adultery are simplified. The; heaviest penalty he would make" five years’ imprisonment. Life sen . fences, he holds, ate no preventive of" crime at all.